Arcane Topics in Economics and Philosophy, Interspersed with Various Distractions

March 10, 2008

Book Review: A Bend in the River

I just finished reading V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River. Wow. This book is fascinating in several distinct ways. First, it represents the point of view of a group of people statistically rather small, but important out of all proportion to their numbers, and whose existence confounds many of our assumptions about economics: the market-dominant minorities, the topic of Amy Chua's book World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. Chua shows how market-dominant minorities exist throughout most of the developing world: the Jews in Russia, the Chinese in southeast Asia, the Lebanese in West Africa, Mexico, and many other places, and so on. I went to Africa (Malawi) shortly after reading this book and was amazed at how prevalent they were. In Malawi, every commercial operation larger than a street vendor seemed to be run by some kind of foreigner. There were Indians, Chinese, Europeans, and Arabs. They didn't live at all on the level of the people. In the midst of one of the poorest countries in the world, I would say their standards of living were comparable to the West. Only, to use economist-speak, the composition of their consumption bundles was very different. I remember a place called the Four Seasons Nursery, run by some people that we met at the church. It was beautiful. A home and a business in one. Plants and carved objects for sale. A large piece of land located near the "City Center." A cafe. There were fountains. What an idyll! Servants. One could deceive oneself into thinking they lived better than the very rich in the United States. But there was another side to it. To order a book from Amazon took weeks. The community was small-- that was how we so easily became close enough to be their guests-- and there was little to do. We stayed in a guesthouse where there was a pool, a beautiful lawn, and in the interior I remember an exquisite German model village. But the reading material! A few shelves of mediocre novels was all they had, and yet I seem to recall some hint in a conversation that made me guess that collection meant a lot to the South African housewife who lived there with her German husband... For after all, what else was there to do? The children of these people went to private schools. I saw the government schools myself-- no windows, no electricity, no desks and chairs, up to a hundred and more pupils in a classroom in the early grades before most of them dropped out-- and I certainly would have done the same. Yet what a signal of being an aristocracy, what a way to set oneself apart! A betrayal of a certain ethos of democracy. And the insecurity. Dogs trained to attack only black people. Electrified barbed-wire fences around the compound. It looks peaceful enough during the day; indeed, perhaps naively, an incautious foreigner, I even went on night walks through the shantytowns, along a nearby road under the moon, along hidden paths where you would sometimes stumble into a patch of oddly-placed corn... But I felt they must know something I didn't. The white people, or most of them, knew how to choose their words; they didn't speak of the Malawians with hatred, but they took precautions and set themselves apart. I met Indians who were franker in their antipathy: "these people, they're animals... if you give them your little finger they'll bite off your arm." Something like that. Raised in the politically-correct West, expressions like this filled me with shock and horror, which I tried for politeness's sake to repress. Yet the same people who spoke this way would treat me with a warmth and hospitality that in the West I might not feel entitled to expect even after years of acquaintance. The color of my skin was, no doubt, a sufficient ticket to the company of those who got this knightly treatment, but if it were racism, then why Indians and whites get along so well, and why did old British-Africans send away for mail-order brides from Japan? It was, rather civilization and all that comes with it, but it's hard to articulate what that is. Education certainly, but not just that.

Anyway, I'm distorting Naipaul's book by bringing in too much of my own experience: it's not that Naipaul's observations were the same as mine, but rather that the novel fascinated me because I wanted to see the world from the perspective of these people. Naipaul's character is a member of an Indian community from the east coast of Africa, people who had "their backs to Africa." For most of the novel, Salim is living in a town at "a bend in the river" in a nameless African country (Francophone, and an exporter of copper), far from his community, and yet he is still part of his community. He is not a runaway; he is following the ancestral trade of his community, running a shop. In economist-speak, he has a form of human capital that the local people lack: book-keeping, organizing stock, looking for bargains. Salim buys the shop from another member of his community who had left it behind after the town was burned in a rebellion; buys it cheap, without ever having seen it, by an oral contract that could hardly be enforced by any state; and this is a striking example of the kind of collective human capital that the community had. Almost a miracle of enterprise, which however that community takes for granted; but at the same time, there is a mistrust, a narrowness of the bonds of affection. Salim would never, for example, start a charity to help African children. It is not the enterprise but the frustration that one feels. The book is, by the way, a reminder that what really matters are people, not countries, and that the world invented in the 20th century where everyone has a state and a nationality is a moral distortion which has victims.

That's one of the fascinating things about the novel. The other is the depiction of how an African state evolved from a post-colonial malaise-- a bit anarchic, but closer to the African past, even with an odd sort of innocence about it-- through an establishment of a new government and a fragile and transient economic boom, to a new and subtler horror of a presidential personality cult. One sees the dream and the tragedy of the "Third World" unfold. It would be an exaggeration to say that A Bend in the River is to Africa what 1984 or The Gulag Archipelago is to the Soviet Union, but it is a fine expose nonetheless.

Comments

Allow me to tell you what they knew that you didn't... its a class thing.
The one flaw in your portrayal of Malawi is that you have forgotten us upper class Malawians. We exhibit all the traits you have described, including servants and private schools. We run businesses. Why make apologies, its a priviledged life, money can import an impressive collection of books and give us things to 'do'. Money protects our property with secure fences and guard dogs. how is this a betrayal of the ethos of democracy? this is the epitome of capitalism! What do you mean that we don't live on the level of 'the people'? we are malawians, show me a country without rich elite!
You hit the nail on the head, its an aristocracy. Malawian society is stratified by class (not race). There are Malawians in each class, indeed there are a variety of races in each class. All the people rich enough to go to four seasons do socialise together... the indians and whites you met were friendly to each other... and friendly to you... because you're all upper class. I assure you there are upper class Malawians at four seasons socialisng without racism!
However there is prejudice between all classes, a slight disdain for those worse-off, but surely this is true the world over.
The brilliance of Naipaul's book is that it tackles the clashing of different classes, as well as addressing the interplay of different racial identities.